An emerging data-coding technology could more than double bandwidth on satellite Internet connections, boosting service to developing countries, planes, and cruise ships—and fixing jerky, stop-and-start images from live video news feeds.

The work is described in a recent paper by researchers at MIT and its Lincoln Laboratory, together with colleagues at the Hamilton Institute in Maynooth, Ireland. They say that the gains could be as much as 20-fold in conditions where data losses are exceptionally large.